oil prices

There is enough trouble out there to keep any policymaker up at night. Recent volatility has roiled Chinese and global stock markets, commodity prices have slumped, and security concerns are rising. All of this raises serious questions over the health of the global economy. This year could shape up to be risky, full of challenges and concerns for the fight against poverty.

We ended 2015 with good news: For the first time in history, the number of extremely poor people dropped below 10% of the world’s population. The new Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate deal bring momentum to our effort to lift the remaining 700 million extremely poor people out of poverty while generating climate-smart economic growth.

They are ones that focus on people, data and events tied to sustainable growth, climate action and efforts to end energy poverty.

As we look ahead to 2016 we’d like to recap 12 popular stories that many of you read and shared in 2015. Thank you for a year of continued and growing readership. Tell us in a comment what you’d like to hear more of in the next year.

With a lifting of sanctions in 2016, Iran could play a key role in energy markets but boosting capacity will require foreign investment, according to the World Bank’s latest edition of Commodity Markets Outlook.

Most commodity prices fell in the third quarter of 2015 as a result of abundant supplies and weak demand, leading to a further downward revision in price forecasts for 2015 and 2016.

Our quarterly Commodities Markets Outlook report analyzes markets for major commodities groups and forecasts prices for 46 commodities from bananas to zinc. The price declines are part of a five-year-long commodities slump.

Growth picked up in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014, after moderating in 2013, but remained weaker than during the pre-crisis years. It softened around the turn of the year owing to headwinds from the plunge in the price of oil. Sub-Saharan Africa’s oil exporters, which account for nearly half of the region’s aggregate output, have been hit hard by the sharp decline in the price of oil. From June 2014 to January 2015, oil prices fell by nearly 50 percent, and have remained low despite the recent uptick.

The impact of falling oil prices is becoming increasingly visible, but the global economy is yet to hit a nice stride - oil exporters face severe headwinds, oil-importing China continues to slow, other large oil-importing countries have seen mixed developments since the start of 2015, and financial market volatility has increased.

After 13 years of independence, Timor-Leste has achieved tremendous progress since being ravaged by conflict – drawing down money from the Petroleum Fund and channeling it through the budget to meet pressing development needs. The effectiveness of this process is evident in the near-halving of infant and child mortality rates; a doubling of school enrollment and access to electricity; economic growth surpassing regional neighbors; increasing citizen participation and; the gradual strengthening of state institutions– all culminating in better lives for Timorese today.

It’s spring in Washington during a pivotal year in development. Thousands of government officials, journalists, civil society representatives, academics, and CEOs are arriving for the Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund the week of April 13.

It’s one of the last such gatherings before decisions are made on the world’s development priorities and goals over the next 15 years – and how to finance them. In fact, the only item on the April 18 agenda of the Development Committee concerns these post-2015 goals and financing for development.

Excluding a handful of oil exporters or countries where sharply depreciating currencies or domestic factors caused inflation to soar, developing country inflation has fallen quite significantly over the past few months and is expected this year to be at its lowest level since 2009 (Figure 1). The broad-based pattern of slowing inflation has been largely driven by plunging oil prices, albeit to varying degrees reflecting in particular exchange rate developments, the extent of fuel subsidies and other price regulations.

Following four years of relative stability at around $105 per barrel (bbl), oil prices have declined sharply since June 2014. It is not the first sharp oil price swing: there have been five other episodes of oil price drops in excess of 30 percent and several more episodes of oil price spikes. Over the past five decades, these steep drops and spikes have stimulated an extensive literature on the macroeconomic implications of oil price swings and the channels through which they operate.